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Companies cannot afford to ignore customer
retention. Research shows that a 5% increase in customer retention rates can raise profits by
25% to 95%, so it’s an area of intense focus for many businesses.
Holding onto your existing customers is where
the goals of customer service, sales and marketing overlap and where support
has the most significant responsibility in driving retention. However, many
support folks aren’t aware of the strong connection between the quality of
customer support and customer loyalty.
Support-Driven
Growth positions customer service as a revenue driver, rather than
merely a means of providing help. Occasionally blurring the lines between
customer service, marketing, and sales, there are three key activities customer
service professionals can perform to boost retention and loyalty.
1. Leverage
Support-Driven Growth
As your support team talks to your customers
on a daily basis, you are in a unique position to drive retention. With almost
every interaction, you can implement the “Yes, and…” principle to
help drive further product adoption and engagement. This will make your
customers want to stay around. In most companies, there are three particular
occasions when agents can naturally do this:
·
Related features: After you have solved the customer’s issue,
ask if they have tried out other similar functions in your product. For
example, once you have finished helping a user to set up email integration, you
could say, “By the way, did you know that we have an integration with Slack,
too?” Your users will be grateful to get useful tips that will enhance
their experience.
·
Promote new features: Agents are usually the first to know about
the latest feature releases, and you can easily promote those in your interactions.
You can drop major updates into your conversations even if they are not
directly linked to the issue at hand. For example, after having helped the
customer change their privacy permissions, mention that you have just released
a new statistics view on the dashboard and offer to give a quick tour on it.
·
Premium features: You can explain paid features to the users
you know would benefit the most. Customer service agents are in an excellent
position to identify those users. For example, if a customer is constantly
struggling with exporting data, introduce the automatic syncing options that
come with the next pricing plan.
These real-life situations, when the user
already feels the need for premium features, are the best opportunities for
upselling products.
These are the interactions that agents can
easily have to build customer retention. If you look at your conversations from
this perspective, you could be upselling the product every day. There is
enormous potential in these interactions.
However, you don’t always have to wait for the
customers to come to you.
2. Be proactive in
customer interactions
With automated emails, you can jump into
customer conversations proactively, without waiting for them to approach you
first. Contacting your customers at the right time will do wonders for your
company’s retention rates.
If you reach out to your users when they have
finished a critical activity that is likely to raise questions — such as
enabling a new integration — you will wow your customers by offering help
before they’ve even asked.
Here’s your part as a support pro:
·
Map the areas of the
product your users are
struggling with the most. These are the possible churning points that you
should look out for. For example, use tags to
categorize your support tickets. See which issues are spiking and
prioritize those in your communication.
·
Provide insight into what content an outreach email should
include. Think of what you would say to a customer who was struggling with a
particular task, and write up a general answer that could be proactively sent
to relevant customers.
·
Follow up on the
responses you received to email
campaigns. Make sure that customers can reply to these messages and that these
end up in the support inbox. This way, you can quickly help them with further
questions and understand what they are most interested in.
Though marketing teams are usually responsible
for setting up automated emails, the content of these will often be
support-related. That is why customer service should be actively involved with
these notifications.
Following the methods described above, you can
make sure users keep using new features and find value in the higher product
tiers through conversations that were, in fact, initiated by you.
This is a model we’ve used at Klaus. For
example, we noticed that some of our users didn’t complete the account
activation flow. So we added automated emails and in-app tooltips with options
for a quick call or a proper demo, to help them through any obstacles they’ve
run into. Doing this, we managed to improve retention for the 25% of customers
who (on average) have become stuck in the process.
3. Use conversation
reviews to identify opportunities for customer retention
Mastering the techniques that drive user
retention takes time. The quickest way to get there is through feedback.
Though it might seem frightening at first,
receiving comments on your work is the most efficient means for professional
growth. By doing systematic
conversation reviews — i.e., letting someone read and assess your
customer interactions — you will learn how to make the most out of
Support-Driven Growth.
Tools like Klaus
allow you to rate conversations based on the categories your team has defined,
like product knowledge, tone of voice, and solution. If you are focusing on
customer retention, you should ask the following questions:
·
Did the agent provide
proper means of further product adoption?
·
Did the agent succeed
in providing proactive help?
These two questions will help you analyze how
well you have implemented the methods of Support-Driven Growth in your
interactions. By including these in your regular feedback, your team will get
used to implementing them on a daily basis.
Peer-led conversation reviews can be the most
efficient way of growing your retention skills.
Other agents are familiar with the situations
that you encounter every day and can be your best mentors in assessing whether
you used all the opportunities for further product adoption and proactive help.
Growing from here
Support should not focus solely on answering
customers’ questions and solving their problems. It should also aim to provide
additional value for your customers and grow customer loyalty through product
engagement.
Implementing Support-Driven Growth techniques
is a skill that comes with time. If you are keen on growing professionally, ask
for feedback from your peers or managers. Use them as your resources in routine
conversation reviews to get advice on how to increase customer loyalty, and
develop your expertise beyond regular customer service.
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